How digital generation students learn and why teachers need to change their teaching methods. “Give up easily when frustration sets in”

Today's students, raised in a world of screens, fast stimuli and immediate rewards, learn completely differently than previous generations. For teachers, it is a challenge to capture their attention, keep them interested and curious. What is known for sure is that it doesn't work anymore classical teaching, in which the teacher dictates, the children write, and the fly is heard in the classroom.

Real learning occurs when students engage, ask questions, debate, solve problems, simulate solutions. Recent teaching models and methods emphasize the active participation of the student, independent work, but also interaction with other peers and the teacher.

For teachers, this is the real challenge: to spark interest and keep attention and motivation high. But how do they know how to do this? I talked about this with university lecturer Dr. Florentina Mogonea, from the Department for the Training of Teaching Staff of the University of Craiova, the place where the teachers of the future are trained.

In the interview below, Florentina Mogonea talks about how students' attention and motivation have changed, about the limits of the traditional teaching model, about the need for active learning and about the skills teachers need today to remain relevant in a classroom that is increasingly different from the one 20 or 30 years ago.

All About Moms: Children's constant exposure to digital content has led to significant attention lapses. How does this show up in the classroom? How are today's students?

Univ. Assoc. Dr. Florentina Mogonea: Yes, today's students are used to fast stimuli specific to the digital environment. As a result, it often becomes more difficult to focus on slower or more complex school activities. Many students feel the need to frequently change the way they work and the type of stimulus or activity. They may have difficulty reading longer messages or following extensive explanations, even when they are delivered in virtual environments. For example, most of the time, children and teenagers fail to fully read or understand the message of an email, if it is a detailed one.

The digital environment offers a type of constant stimulation with rapid response and immediate rewards and gratification. School-type activity, however, requires sustained effort and results that, often, are left to be expected. For this reason, a lower tolerance for cognitive frustration is sometimes observed: when the task seems more difficult or when the results are delayed, some students tend to give up on the activity.

Another characteristic of current generations is multitasking. Many students try to do several tasks at the same time: they solve homework while listening to music, watch different videos on the Internet or initiate discussions with friends, colleagues, etc. In reality, it is not about the simultaneous performance of several tasks, but about a rapid switching between them, which can reduce the quality of information processing and the efficiency of learning. At the same time, today's students show an obvious preference for interactive activities and for visual and auditory stimuli. They are less attracted to mechanical memorization and much more interested in solving tasks that are related to everyday life.

In contrast, students often have greater cognitive autonomy: they are used to searching for information on their own, asking probing questions to the teacher, and even challenging certain ideas or statements, which can contribute to the development of critical thinking. Therefore, the challenge for teachers is not to compete with the digital environment, but to find solutions to integrate it into the learning activity.

Read the rest of the interview HERE.